Evaluating discussion boards on Blackboard© as a collaborative learning tool: A students' survey and reflections

In this paper we investigate how the students think of their experience in a junior level course that has a blackboard course presence where the discussion boards are used extensively by the students. A survey is set up through blackboard as a voluntary quiz and the student who participated were given a freebie point. The results and the participation were very interesting in terms of the feedback we got via open comments from the students as well as the statistics we gathered from the answers to the questions. The students have shown understanding and willingness to participate in pedagogy-enhancing endeavors.